The black arts

Sometimes in life it is what you don't properly see, what you cannot properly hear or that you cannot fathom that disturbs or actually frightens you the most. We get half a story, a whisper or a fleeting glimpse and our mind will fill in the blanks, envisioning to "us" what "it" want's. Indeed, without such a facility to fashion images to our consciousness, human sight would be very stressful indeed, as scientific investigation and those unfortunate to suffering anomalies of the mind have testified. Take theses few images as vey simple examples.

We know this is a motionless picture, but you try telling that to your mind. It's trying to deliver a sensible picture to "you", based in its life of experiences, but it can't decide, so you may be seeing the beads move, but even using one eye alone, many people will perceive two central troughs in what you know is just a flat picture.

This picture is flat but your brain has probably decide you are looking at a distant, probably moving, circular pattern through a patterned card with a hole in it. The change in the scale of the outer patterns suggest depth, the fuzz circles imply great distance, so your brain falls back on its rules of sight and gives you the impression you are no doubt experiencing now. Intriguingly I tried this on a friend and their experience was different to mine; that the card held a magnifying lens held over a spotty background. 

All lines in this image are straight and parallel to each other, but the larger it becomes in your field of vision the more the image appears to distort. As your eyes rove larger images, the influent of your peripheral vision and a degree of temporary image retention on your retina starts to confuse the brain. To prove this move away from this image and it will look as it really is.

Watch this YouTube video and be amazed at how your brain messes with what you see, as does this one

Anyway, I think we are a point of attention when I can tell you of my personal point of interest. I asked myself the question , "If your mind fills in bits, how will a picture change if you slowly remove or alter bits of it, thereby forcing your mind to add its bits to give it's meaning of what your eye is seeing?" 

After fiddling about with images a bit I realised your mind is pretty quick at spotting what is missing once it makes its mind up and doesn't seem to make up anything of its own, but that if the darken an image, or bits off it to a point of abstraction you brain starts to add its own bits back until it is satisfied the message to you makes sense.

Try these